Ladies

I was planning on waiting to announce my new book until I could distribute a few copies to friends but it looks like the news is already out.

I wrote a book. Have you ever tried it? It’s a lot of typing for sure. Actually, if you read this space regularly you have probably read most of it since it’s an anthology of these columns and others arranged by subject rather than date. That means I didn’t really write a book and you don’t have to rush out to buy it (did I ever mention that I have two kids in college?). Seriously.

The arrangement by subject is what makes it interesting, at least to me. Writing a column or a blog on subjects that interest you, like CRM for example, means plowing the same fields from time to time. And arranging your work by subject matter lets the reader see how consistent your thinking is, or is not. Fortunately for me, it is and I am.

Oops! Almost forgot, the title is “Hello, Ladies! Dispatches from the Social CRM Frontier” based on the title piece which looked at some research that said most social media users are women. There’s more research in there, too, that shows most people on Twitter just watch — only ten percent post things; about once every 74 days, that is. My point in compiling these pieces was to show the other side of many CRM phenomena and that what’s new and cool might need to come with a small warning label. Hey, I’m an analyst and that’s what we do.

I tried to select my writings about the subjects I know best and that have been most timely in the last two years and I came up with some you’d expect and others you might not. So there are sections on CRM, customer experience, social media and cloud computing. But there are also — among my favorites — sections on economics and sustainability, two areas that are increasingly important.

It was also interesting to see that, at least on my blog, I could be a bit of a potty mouth with titles like “Google grows a pair,” about the dust up between Google and China and “Evil thieving bastards” about the credit card industry’s approach to crM (heavy accent on the “M”). I’m sure I’ll end up hearing about this from mom.

In a marketplace that no longer takes breaks and where the news cycle is seamless, it was surprising to me that the pieces in this book, arranged by subject, could hang together and possibly even illuminate their subjects. The book format offers a small amount of perspective compared to the instant idea transmission offered by social media. That allows for some circumspection even if it’s only about choosing what goes in and what doesn’t.

By way of analogy, they say that the news is the first draft of history. If that’s so then this book might represent a kind of second draft. So far, I like what it says about our industry and I am grateful to have the chance to write some of it.